In a 2014 book documenting the history of electronic music in Düsseldorf, Germany, Gabi Delgado-Lopez, singer for electro-punk innovators Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft (German-American Friendship, DAF), discussed the band’s sonic antecedents. Explaining how DAF sought to chart a new musical path forward, he boldly asserted that the band had eschewed all previous influences: ‘We didn’t want to sound as if we were “historically aware”; we didn’t want to follow traditions.’Footnote ¹ Yet, as with much else that Delgado-Lopez has intimated over the years, his comments must be taken with a grain of salt: in that very same book he also expressed considerable admiration for Conny Plank, the Krautrock sound engineer par excellence, who recorded DAF’s best albums: ‘Conny was a real hippie,’ he conceded, ‘a hippie in the best sense.’Footnote ² Delgado-Lopez is not alone in this, as German punk pioneers have frequently acknowledged how influential Krautrock has been for their own music.

While Delgado-Lopez is a notoriously suspect source, his claim nonetheless reflects one of punk’s most enduring myths: that punk was a visceral rejection of 1970s rock ’n’ roll, a radical agenda of musical rupture. As critics have long contended, punk music, fashion, and lifestyle constituted perhaps the biggest musical departure since Elvis.Footnote ³ With its fast tempos, distorted guitars, and snotty vocals, punk disdain for all that came before ostensibly freed the genre from the conventions of history and imbued artists and fans with a restless search for fresh musical vistas. Certainly, as punk evolved in the 1970s and 1980s across the globe, countless musicians and bands experimented with myriad forms of new sounds, styles, and behaviours as they sought to actualise musical rupture. This myth is thus deeply embedded in many of the practices and purposes that have guided the genre since its birth; myths, after all, usually contain at least some kernels of truth.

Krautrock too, like every music genre, has its own set of myths. As Ulrich Adelt has noted, the genre’s musical eclecticism makes it hard to categorise what is or is not Krautrock with definitive precision.Footnote ⁴ Nevertheless, Krautrock certainly had a time and a place, emerging in the late 1960s in West Germany and reaching its musical apex in the following decade. Krautrock bands often combined a host of at times competing musical influences – electronic minimalism, jazzy leads, layered soundscapes, noisy sounds, groovy basslines, syncopated drumming, and even German-language lyrics – to create some of the most experimental sonic tapestries of the decade. Yet, scholars of Krautrock tell us that these musical innovations made scant impressions upon their fellow Germans, and only found slight resonance abroad in Britain, especially among the music press. Indeed, it is only recently that Krautrock has enjoyed a certain belated recognition for its musical originality, having been discovered (again) by British critics and celebrated as an indigenous German musical tradition. As this obscure history suggests, one of Krautrock’s myths is its mystery, a hidden repository of wisdom and sound whose innovations remained unrecognised at the time, only to be rediscovered by future generations.

Myths, however, for all their simplifying structures and oftentimes common-sense logic – or rather, because of them – usually do not stand up to even mild interrogation. Indeed, when considering the relationship between Krautrock and punk, as Delgado-Lopez’s appreciation of Plank indicates, the suggestion that the genre was lost to Germans only to be recuperated by foreigners years later is belied by the tremendous influence that Krautrock had on subsequent musical developments. Of all the musical antecedents that came together to create punk, Krautrock seems to be the most unlikely. Yet as we will see, Krautrock and punk shared tremendous similarities as punk developed in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. While certainly not every musical influence informing punk can be traced to Krautrock – breaks are just as prominent as continuities as even a cursory listen to the two genres attests – enough exist to make us question punk’s foundational myth of musical rupture.

In what follows, I track the evolution of punk as it developed in West Germany during the late 1970s and early 1980s and explore its connections to Krautrock. Doing so shows not only how punk’s claims of musical rupture are more fiction than fact, but also that Krautrock, despite the near unanimity about its absent legacy, was not quite as unknown in its home country as commentators often suggest. And what above all unites Krautrock and punk were efforts at developing an indigenous popular music culture, although as we will see, both genres tried to do so in radically different ways.

Foreign Sounds, Domestic Appropriation: Punk in West Germany

While there is no space to recount the story of punk’s origins again, suffice to say, punk did not originate in West Germany, but rather in Britain and the United States. In the 1970s, bands playing fast, aggressive sounds, singing raw, provocative lyrics, and engaging in confrontational stage shows emerged across the United States. Offering a stark alternative to the peace and love of 1960s psychedelia, critics and artists saw in this music a means of making rock ’n’ roll dangerous again. Inspired by these developments, scenes soon dotted the urban areas of the country and by mid-decade, punk was ready for export overseas. In 1975, British fashion designer Malcolm McLaren put together a group of local delinquents as The Sex Pistols to sell his clothing through outrage and rudimentary rock ’n’ roll. A shambolic musical outfit, the band courted controversy everywhere they went. But they also inspired a wave of similar acts whose belligerent sounds, sneering lyrics, and shocking performances upended musical customs. Within a year, punk had washed over the British Isles to the glee of a small if devoted fanbase and to the angst of the population at large.

Young West Germans followed these events with rapt attention. Long-accustomed to monitoring trends via the foreign press and visits abroad, Germans were always on the look-out for new sounds. With a few exceptions, music culture in mid-1970s West Germany was an assortment of indigenous Schlager, homegrown imitations, and imported rock. However, punk turned the heads of those looking for something different. The antagonism, insolence, and cheek embedded in punk praxis was attractive to youths fed up with the boring workaday present. As elsewhere, punk’s celebration of musical amateurism and its DIY attitude was appealing to youth: instead of countless hours practicing, punk encouraged kids to just get up and play. After some early concerts and tours by British acts, bands and scenes began to form in the big cities of the Federal Republic: Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Hanover, and West Berlin.Footnote ⁵

At first, German punks mostly imitated their English forerunners, blaring distorted chords and singing about the banalities of daily life. By 1978, youths had begun establishing the spaces and networks that were growing the subculture: clubs where bands could play like the Ratinger Hof in Düsseldorf or SO36 in West Berlin; fanzines to promote the genre to wider audiences like The Ostrich, No Fun, or Pretty Vacant; record labels to release punk music like Konnekschen or No Fun Records; and independent shops to supply youths with punk wares like the Zensor in West Berlin or Rip Off in Hamburg. And the mainstream media began to take notice: in early 1978, Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading liberal news magazine, ran a sensational article about punk (‘Punk: Culture from the Slums’), depicting the subculture as a social menace and its adherents duped by the music industry’s perpetual search for profit.

But quickly, West German punk came into its own. Especially in the more middle-class milieus of Düsseldorf and West Berlin, artists began to experiment with sounds and lyrics as they moved from imitation to innovation. By late 1978, several bands had started singing in German, an invention heralding a tectonic shift in the ability of bands to express themselves in their native tongue. Others began experimenting with new sounds and instruments as they groped towards music that would better reflect their surroundings. Bands as diverse as Mittagspause, S.Y.P.H., Einstürzende Neubauten, and Malaria! used these advances to better connect with audiences: no longer alienated by emulating Anglo-American originals, punks began to map out a new world of sonic possibilities for German listeners.

The next year, Sounds, the leading music magazine in the Federal Republic, threw its weight behind the genre as several journalists, especially Alfred Hilsberg, saw in punk the beginnings of a new national popular music culture. In 1979, the first recordings were released, and the first large festivals were staged, products and events suturing together the various scenes into a national collective. But already the scene started to fragment as different understandings of punk began splitting the subculture: for some, punk was a platform for individuality and experimentation, while for others, punk was a vehicle of social revolution and leftist politics.

Despite the growing divide, by the 1980s, the punk subculture had exploded across West Germany. Countless cities featured thriving scenes. Concerts were nightly affairs and tours criss-crossed the country. Albums poured forth from independent record labels and began to make their mark on the charts. As punk’s popularity increased, the music industry awoke to the sonic and monetary possibilities of the new German sounds. By 1981, major labels had signed countless new acts and begun releasing music from some of the more commercial sounding ones, marketed as the Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave, NDW). Driven by the success of bands such as Ideal, Trio, Nena, and many more, German-language artists dominated the musical and cultural landscape of the Federal Republic in the early 1980s.Footnote ⁶

Such growth, however, fuelled a widening divide within the underground scene. Aghast at the blatant profiteering and trite absurdity which characterised some of the NDW – especially as latecomers jumped on the bandwagon with little or no connection to the earlier scene – the subculture split. Slowly but surely, the more sonically adventurous artists abandoned the scene as conformity settled over the subculture. With an emphasis on fast rhythms, political lyrics, and hostile attitudes, the subtle nuances that had characterised punk initially began to disappear as hardcore – as this subgenre of punk came to be called – soon dominated the scene. Indeed, by 1983 at the latest, punk in West Germany was defined almost exclusively by the hardcore variant and has been ever since.

Continuities and Similarities: Musical Innovations and Generational Revolt

This short history of punk in West Germany, on its surface, seems to deny any continuities with Krautrock. Yet by exploring the ideological imperatives, musical elements, and subcultural praxis guiding punk, we can see how the genre mined Krautrock in various ways. Not only do these echoes suggest tremendous continuities between the genres, but they also point to the direct legacy of Krautrock on later German popular music genres. Above all, we can see is how both Krautrock and later punk sought – in their own ways – to use music as a form of emancipation.

Yet even on the surface there existed considerable similarities and connections between Krautrock and punk. Despite bombastic claims to the contrary, many punks acknowledged not only a debt to Krautrock but a genuine admiration for their musical ancestors. Figures as diverse as Blixa Bargeld from Einstürzende Neubauten, Harry Rag from S.Y.P.H., Jürgen Engler from Die Krupps, or Ralf Dörper from Propaganda have all expressed at one time or another their appreciation for bands like Faust, Can, Cluster, Kraftwerk, and others: Rag went so far as to suggest his musical objective was to mix punk with Can.Footnote ⁷ Nor were these parallels a one-way street either as several Krautrock musicians – Holger Czukay from Can, for example – have hinted that Krautrock behaviours, such as their atypical stage shows, prefigured punk.Footnote ⁸ While others reject such insinuations as anachronistic – Michael Rother dismisses the suggestion by Julian Cope that Neu! invented punk avant-la-lettre – nonetheless, many continuities connect Krautrock to punk.Footnote ⁹

Indeed, there were significant personnel links between Krautrock and punk. Czukay, much to Rag’s delight, helped produce several S.Y.P.H. albums, while Klaus Schulze from Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel released Ideal’s breakthrough debut on his IC label. Alfred Hilsberg, the Sounds journalist whose independent record label ZickZack released records from many of the most experimental punk bands, began his career organising Krautrock shows in his hometown of Wolfsburg. And Conny Plank, the Krautrock audio engineer, collaborated with DAF, Die Krupps, and others as he gravitated towards electronic pop in the 1980s: indeed, his production of DAF’s Alles ist gut (1981) won the top record award of the Deutsche Phono-Akademie.Footnote ¹⁰

Of course, not all punk or NDW musicians received Krautrock quite so favourably: if one can find compliments, one can equally find condemnations. Delgado-Lopez, despite his praise for Plank, also dismissed bands like Kraftwerk for their arrogant behaviour and languid stage shows.Footnote ¹¹ Meikel Clauss, guitarist for the hardcore outfit KFC and later NDW act Nichts, likewise spoke generally about a distrust the younger generation felt for those with long hair.Footnote ¹² In fact, long hair – the body – was a critical location where punk and Krautrock diverged: Peter Hein, the Mittagspause and Fehlfarben singer, spoke for many when he observed that Krautrockers looked just as ridiculous as punks, but unlike the former, for the latter, that ‘was our job’.Footnote ¹³

Even those who could appreciate Krautrock music had difficulty accepting the cultural baggage accompanying the 1960s generation. Diedrich Diederichsen, former editor of Sounds and Spex, for example, has elaborated how, back then, hippies unproblematically recuperated German romanticism in their fascination with Eastern esotericism, an assemblage informing their musical productions that, for a younger generation, was precisely the kind of naïveté that had led to Nazism in the 1930s.Footnote ¹⁴ Although we should perhaps be sceptical of Diederichsen’s analysis of Nazism, nevertheless, for punks, such sentiments were common currency and fuelled their contempt for Krautrock: indeed, there are numerous accounts of confrontations occurring between youths and their elders, conflicts even involving physical violence.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet for all the invective some punks spewed toward Krautrock, such engagement nonetheless speaks to connection whereby the latter functioned as an ‘Other’ for the former to rage against in their musical constructions.

Nevertheless, despite such antagonism, continuity was the dominant relationship between Krautrock and punk. These connections are quite explicit in the impulses driving both genres. One of Krautrock’s ideological imperatives was the creation of a new cultural heritage, freed from the historical legacies that seemed to plague West German society in the 1960s. On the one hand, this meant divorcing German cultural production and expression from any hint of a nationalist or fascist past. On the other hand, it meant establishing indigenous musical forms rooted in German experiences rather than Anglo-American pop traditions.

Punks too saw their endeavours in such terms, as both a repudiation of the past and as a means of forging an alternative future. At the heart of their ambition was a commitment to radical experimentation in pursuit of cultural renewal. For many youths, the 1970s was a bleak decade full of stultifying conformity and deadening boredom, a period when ‘Germany felt like an upholstered living room with a fat, cigarette-smoking old Nazi boss in it’, as Frank Bielmeier from Mittagspause has evocatively described.Footnote ¹⁶ While not all youths felt burdened by the past to such an extent, for those who did, music was one way to break from such temporal claustrophobia.

To escape this living room of a bygone era, punk authorised radical musical rupture. Like Krautrock a decade prior, punk offered youths the freedom to pursue alternative models of identity and community through different sounds, rhythms, instruments, and more. As Bielmeier put it, while punk was developing in the late 1970s, there was ample space ‘to try different things’ as youths sought to remake rock ’n’ roll’s sonic catalogue.Footnote ¹⁷ In its initial phase before conformity took over the subculture in the 1980s, punk was a plethora of diverse music and unconventional sounds. For some, this meant composing songs around feelings. For others, it meant jettisoning verses, choruses, or refrains. Some tried introducing strange instruments or noises into the musical line-up: the construction of drums out of scraps of metal by Einstürzende Neubauten, for example, was an effort at expanding rock’s rhythmic timbres.

But irrespective of tone or rhythm or lyrics or style, the purpose was clear: break with tradition and forge a new path forwards. Bernward Malaka, bassist for Male and later Die Krupps, put punk striving well when he remarked: ‘We had the feeling that we could break with everything. Traditions: who gives a shit! They didn’t mean anything. And certainly not to us.’Footnote ¹⁸ Comparing such statements with Rother’s claim that Neu! ‘simply wanted to play and strive forward, align ourselves to the horizon’ illustrates the parallels between Krautrock and punk: both sought to radically revise musical expression and break with prior conceptions of music-making.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, even though many punks rejected Kraftwerk’s techno-modernity or disparaged Ash Ra Tempel’s sonic anarchy (their musical contents), the impulses driving the search for new sounds and styles (their musical intentions) were analogous.

As the comments about old Nazis and the discovery of new sounds suggest, punk – like Krautrock before it – was motivated at least in part by generational revolt. As observers have noted, Krautrock was intimately linked to the youth revolts taking place in the late 1960s and the alternative milieu of the 1970s.Footnote ²⁰ Rebuffing a world considered to be synthetic and illegitimate, bands as diverse as Faust or Popol Vuh scorned the mainstream conventions of then popular German music. Instead, ethereal soundscapes merged with frenetic saxophones as Krautrock bands experimented with new sounds and rhythms and tones and more.

Punk too was motivated by a rejection of prior musical authorities, and rebelled against the principles governing mainstream musical expression and production. Denial of convention thus motivated the hunt for new musical possibilities in both the 1960s and the 1970s. These resemblances point to how punks were pursuing a similar strategy of musical refusal. Some have even commented upon these connections quite explicitly: Margitta Haberland, singer and violinist for Abwärts, who participated in both the hippie and the punk revolts a decade apart, has noted how both had ‘a similar approach’ to cultural reinvention.Footnote ²¹

Of course, the generation punks were revolting against was the ’68ers: in other words, against the Krautrock generation. Countless statements by countless punks over the years attest to youth disgust with their elders. Punk hatred of hippies was complex. For some, the earnestness and seriousness of ’68ers was off-putting. Others complained that hippie dogmatism was equally fascist as any Nazi. Most could not stand the endless conversations that hippies wanted to have or the probing for psychological trauma. Punks especially chaffed at the restrictions on thought or speech that they felt the Krautrock generation imposed upon others: Moritz Reichelt from Der Plan speaks for many when he describes how ‘unfree’ he felt back then, how there were ‘many subjects’ that were off-limits because to admit liking skyscrapers or concrete or plastic meant your progressive credentials were now in doubt.Footnote ²² In the late 1960s, Krautrockers were rejecting a society that had failed to come to terms with its past and seemed to be slipping into another authoritarian nightmare. Yet as Reichelt’s comments suggest, punks were tilting at a similar windmill as these one-time rebels – a mere decade later – had become the reactionaries.

And in their rejection of hippies, punks condemned them for the same hypocrisies that ’68ers had directed at their parents. The indictments punks lobbed at hippies were endless. Punks snorted derisively at hippies’ romantic adoration of nature as nothing but escapist pandering.Footnote ²³ They dismissed their ideological assumptions that saw workers as the revolutionary subject.Footnote ²⁴ They hated the over-emphasis on politics; indeed, some youths were attracted to punk by its lack of politics.Footnote ²⁵ They condemned the smug arrogance of ’68ers who had supposedly liberated society through sit-ins and demonstrations: as Xao Seffcheque has insightfully observed, just as hippies had once grown their hair long to assert independence from their elders, so too did punks chop their long hair off to reject theirs.Footnote ²⁶

Crucially, the utopianism that motivated the 1960s generation was denied by punks, who were overjoyed that ‘Die Welt ist schlecht, das Leben ist schön’ (The World Is Terrible, but Life Is Grand) as a Der Plan song put it.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, the realism coursing through punk, the beauty that punks felt for a world of advertising and stoplights, was a posture intended to contrast themselves with their ancestors: when S.Y.P.H. sang ‘Zurück zum Beton’ (Back to Concrete), they did so to antagonise hippies, much as ’68ers had once done through a celebration of nature with their parents.Footnote ²⁸ Certainly, the contents of punk criticisms were different, but the forms were similar, a continuousness speaking to the limits of generational revolt, or perhaps even an innate repetitiousness of music culture critique.

Ruptures and Differences: Music-Making and the Politics of Emancipation

Yet intriguingly, haircuts and a love of cement also points to how, just as Krautrock had sought to restore agency and independence to German music culture years prior, so too did punk. The creation of the legendary institutions and infrastructure surrounding Krautrock – from the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in West Berlin to the independent record labels like Ohr and Brain – were efforts by ’68ers to overcome the constraints of conventional youth culture and the hegemony of the music industry. These spaces and structures sought to construct alternative sites of musical production and to free artists and audiences from socio-economic dependency. The push for artistic autonomy was similarly a major objective informing punk. The DIY impulse, so crucial to the alternative milieu and to punk, was front and centre in this endeavour.Footnote ²⁹

As both a necessity and an ethos, youths attracted to punk had been compelled to create their own music culture because the music industry had no interest in it, at least initially. Before the subculture burst into the mainstream in the 1980s, punks had stapled together photocopies to make fanzines, rented out rooms to create clubs, and painted the tops of beer caps to fashion buttons. These activities sought to emancipate punk from influences in society that controlled music culture, whether the fashion industry or the mainstream media. Hilsberg’s ZickZack record label, for example, just like Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s Ohr, was created to release music that the major labels were ignoring.Footnote ³⁰

The label’s slogan, ‘Lieber zu viel als zu wenig’ (Better too much than too little) was intended literally, to flood the market with punk music, and towards this end, Hilsberg released hundreds of records over the years. For youths in both the 1960s and 1970s, these drives towards independence were part and parcel of their musical rebellion as they sought to transform the production and consumption of music both spiritually and materially.

Indeed, DIY was a crucial continuity connecting punk with Krautrock as a vehicle of emancipation. More than anything, punk DIY freed music from professionalism and returned art to the hands of amateurs. One of the biggest complaints by punks was how contemporary music-making had been robbed of spontaneity and accessibility through virtuosity and professionalism. Considering such emphases alienating and inhibiting, punks instead sought to return music to the masses through dilettantism whereby sound was subordinate to expression, and talent secondary to effort.

In this respect, punk amateurism sought to democratise rock ’n’ roll, an objective many Krautrock artists had sought as well.Footnote ³¹ In discussing how punks made music, Padeluun, a performance artist and sporadic member of Minus Delta t, explained: ‘With punk, it didn’t matter what came out. It wasn’t about having any form of perfection … rather, it was about showing other people: “You can do this too.”’Footnote ³² Such inspiration was also reflective of the incomplete nature of punk sound – the idea that music must not be perfect, that failure was an essential element of creation – a sentiment that encouraged people to get involved. These emancipatory attitudes, which hark back to earlier genres, unbound music-making and helped expand composition and performance beyond a narrow circle of professionals.

When punks made music, they often endeavoured to invent new sounds and new tones as part of their musical insurgency. And one of the driving impetuses behind these struggles was a rejection of foreign musical traditions. For many youths, punk was an explicit means of freeing Germans from Anglo-American musical hegemony. As numerous artists have articulated, both at the time and since, they were frustrated that Anglo-Americans held ‘a monopoly’ over modern music, that Anglo-American conventions ruled musical production.Footnote ³³ Harry Rag, for instance, was annoyed that in the 1970s, every song had to have a beginning and an end, while Delgado-Lopez hated harmony, verses, and refrains.Footnote ³⁴ Nor was this monopoly simply a matter of sounds or composition, as they linked such hegemony to a loss of voice and identity.

Delgado-Lopez, for instance, told Sounds at the time about the cognitive dissonance experienced by German bands as they made music: ‘It’s so funny to be in an all-German band playing for a German audience and singing in English!’Footnote ³⁵ But as punks began to sing in German, and to make ‘German music’ they sought to broaden the space available for new forms of identifications, community, and culture. In this sense, punk represented a mode of resistance, defiance against musical dominion as artists wrested control over sonic expression that allowed youths the opportunity to create music that was modern, stylish, and ‘German’.

Punk distaste for Anglo-American conventions was of course already prefigured a decade earlier by Krautrock musicians. As they sought to expand the conventions of musical possibility, they too had often pushed back against foreign impositions en route to developing their own musical and cultural identities. Amon Düül II guitarist John Weinzierl, for example, has related how the band did not imitate American rock and instead sought to discover a new path forward musically: ‘It was about listening, seeing what comes, what could be done, what could be done differently.’Footnote ³⁶ Schulze too has insisted that Tangerine Dream refused to copy Anglo-American music, how they deliberately played with new forms of musical expression, while Can sought to reject any blues-based formulations, which were deemed inappropriate for West German acts.Footnote ³⁷

Of course, how to create ‘German music’ was an open question and my use of scare quotes points to the concept’s fundamental instability. For punks, creating ‘German music’ was similarly embedded in a rejection of Anglo-American pop traditions. But unlike Krautrockers, many punks located Germanness in their native tongue. Indeed, what separates punk above all from Krautrock is the former’s emphasis on lyrics and singing in German. While a few bands had experimented with German lyrics – notably Kraftwerk’s nursery rhyme repetitions and the occasional word by Can vocalist Damo Suzuki – sound-dominated Krautrock.

For punks, however, vocals quickly became paramount. When punk first emerged in West Germany, bands copied Anglo-American acts and sang in English. But already by 1978, especially in the Ruhr region, bands started to experiment with German-language lyrics. That hippies had rejected German as a continuity with the fascist past meant the native tongue was available for punk’s generational revolt. However, the move to German lyrics was more than simply a Pavlovian reaction. Songs were crafted to reflect everyday life as artists penned songs that could articulate contemporary concerns. Certainly, in the initial late-1970s burst of German-language songwriting, punk songs thematised many of the most pressing issues of the day: the Cold War, terrorism, deindustrialisation, etc. And critics hearing punk at the time understood how revolutionary the turn to German-language lyrics was: Hilsberg, writing in Sounds about Mittagspause’s classic anthem ‘Militürk’, gushed that the song ‘tells us more about Germany in 1979 than many pages of analysis’.Footnote ³⁸ As Hilsberg’s review recognised, German lyrics suddenly gave youth a new vocabulary of expression to vocalise the present after decades of remaining voiceless.

To sing in German, however, was challenging. As many commentators have observed, singing in German in the post-war era was considered taboo. Associated with Schlager or the Third Reich, German lyrics were deemed provincial or xenophobic.Footnote ³⁹ They were also judged inappropriate for rock ’n’ roll rhythms; that Anglo-American music became the lingua franca of 1960s youth culture only solidified these prejudices. For youths growing up in the 1970s, these biases were common: as Moritz Reichelt put it: ‘In my hippie days, I didn’t listen to Kraftwerk because it was German. And German was above all embarrassing.’Footnote ⁴⁰ To sing in German meant to compose songs that would reflect German syntax and grammar, to write music accentuating alternative rhythms and irregular tempos. In the New Musical Express, for example, Delgado-Lopez outlined many of the considerations that needed to be pondered when pairing German-language texts with the electronica that DAF was pioneering in the early 1980s:

DAF saw this development as the culmination of their attempts to free German popular music from what they and others at the time called ‘English pop imperialism’.Footnote ⁴² They were not alone: as Bob Giddens from ZigZag put it: ‘For me, being a Brit, DAF was the only band – aside from Kraftwerk – who managed to form a unit out of German lyrics and music, reflecting German culture without any Anglo-American influences.’Footnote ⁴³

Conclusion

The connection between Kraftwerk and DAF by an outside observer speaks to the continuities existing within German popular music. Of course, to listen to a Krautrock song and a punk song side-by-side is to immediately note the incredibly sonic dissimilarities: one does not need to be a musicologist to understand these are vastly different musical genres. Yet peeling back the surface to look at some of the underlying ideologies and impulses guiding these musical creations is to recognise tremendous continuities. Whether in the search for new musical innovations, the generational revolt, the emphasis on independence, or the attempts to create ‘German music’, punk and Krautrock share a surprising number of similarities.

For these reasons, the myth of musical rupture, which often informs our understanding of punk, demands greater scrutiny, as does the myth of Krautrock’s absent presence: Krautrock was an influential spectre haunting German punk. As punk and Krautrock become increasingly incorporated into German cultural heritage, exploring the ways in which these genres respond to and interrogate with each other over time can illuminate the ways in which past echoes help direct future sounds.

The experimental aesthetic and anti-rock ethos of Krautrock played a key role in shaping the sound of British post-punk music. The term ‘post-punk’ is generally applied to the avant-garde popular music that arose in the immediate aftermath of the punk scene in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s. Well-known musicians who had been central to punk in Britain – perhaps most notably singer Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) of the Sex Pistols – drew upon Krautrock as a means to escape the strictures of their own legacy. Other bands that had been catalysed by punk’s energy – like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus – channelled Krautrock’s ‘Teutonic coolness’ into new subgenres, such as gothic rock.

Still others, like Manchester’s Joy Division, took David Bowie’s Krautrock-inspired Berlin albums as a cue to experiment with songwriting, production, and expression; and post-punk cult band The Fall, also from Manchester, used Krautrock as the foundation for their potpourri of stylistic influences. Indeed, it was ultimately the post-punk rocker, Julian Cope, singer of The Teardrop Explodes, who would serve as Krautrock’s most important and vocal advocate in Britain, publishing his now-(in)famous compendium, Krautrocksampler, in 1995.Footnote ¹

This essay focusses on several main issues. First, it addresses the question of how to define ‘post-punk’ in the first place, a vague term often simply used as a catch-all for the creative explosion and intermingling of genres that occurred in alternative British popular music, as punk was on the wane. Second, it considers how Krautrock contributed to the aesthetic of post-punk music. Finally, it reflects upon Krautrock as part of a broader and arguably constitutive Germanophilic impulse in the British post-punk movement.

The End of Punk and the Birth of Post-Punk

The historiography of popular music tends to privilege the punk era in Britain, focusing narrowly on the years 1976–77 as a period of musical revolution during which youth culture, driven by a general feeling of nihilism and ennui over socio-economic conditions, sought to challenge – if not overturn – the musical status quo via angry, irreverent, and often amateurish stripped-down rock. Epitomised by the Sex Pistols, whose proclamation of ‘no future’ and clarion calls for ‘anarchy in the UK’ characterised the genre, punk rejected much of what it saw in the popular music of the early 1970s – the self-indulgent virtuosity of progressive rock, the worn-out leftovers of blues-based hard rock, the banality of disco – in favour of the raw authenticity found in the simple, loud, sped-up garage rock already popularised in the United States by bands like MC5, Iggy and The Stooges, and The Ramones. Punk in Britain inspired a youth fashion movement comprised of ripped clothes and spiked hair, a club scene that featured primitive and punitive dancing, and a DIY approach to music that gave birth to a host of bands that could barely play their instruments as they noisily antagonised their audiences.Footnote ²

Punk is well-known for its ‘back-to-basics’ aesthetic, focusing on rudimentary rock beats, a limited harmonic palette, self-produced recordings and a loose approach to pitch, rhythm, and ensemble playing. But rather than being a revolutionary movement, from a musical perspective punk was a decisive regression: in effect, it was something of a revivalist movement, its primary elements based firmly in the roots of rock. It was arguably the years immediately after punk that were truly radical and transformative, with young British musicians orienting themselves towards experimentation, hybridisation and, in sharp contrast to punk’s nihilism, the future.

What Is Post-Punk?

The primary challenge presented by the concept of ‘post-punk’ as a genre is the stylistic diversity – or rather, the stylistic ‘inconsistency’, as musicologist Mimi Haddon insistsFootnote ³ – of the music associated with it. The label ‘post-punk’ denotes a time period after punk, spanning roughly 1978–85, but also suggests a surpassing of punk with respect to its aesthetic characteristics. Haddon offers the following summary of post-punk, as it is commonly described in scholarly and journalistic discourses:

While this by no means encapsulates the totality of the post-punk movement, it provides a place to start. A key point – and directly applicable to Krautrock as well – is the paradoxical identity of the genre as diverse yet somehow coherent: post-punk is a recognisable genre that is at the same time highly fragmented and diasporic, comprising a kaleidoscope of subgenres emerging out of the rubble of punk. Also paradoxical is post-punk’s supposed modernist turn towards radical newness, in which moving forwards to reject punk’s conservativism – a rejection in fact catalysed by punk’s energy and attitude – also meant looking backwards to the music of the pre-punk era, to borrow from the genres that punk had rejected, including disco, funk, and progressive rock. In so doing, post-punk was at once anti-punk even as it was saving punk from itself, allowing it to expand and diversify.Footnote ⁵

Post-punk is a genre too large and too diverse to survey here, but there is a handful of representative bands that will be the focus of this chapter and will serve to demonstrate the affinities between post-punk and Krautrock, including Public Image Ltd., Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Bauhaus.

One Path to Post-Punk: David Bowie and Krautrock in Berlin

Post-punk owes an enormous debt to David Bowie, who was in turn indebted to Krautrock during a key moment of artistic crisis and change. As Simon Reynolds observes, Bowie’s propensity for reinventing himself, for ‘always chasing the next edge’ made him the primary ‘inspiration for post-punk’s ethos of perpetual change’.Footnote ⁶ In addition to a penchant for black music styles – especially reggae, ska, and dub – post-punk bands drew heavily from Bowie’s personae and musical style. Bowie’s glam era inspired many post-punk musicians and groups, including early goth bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees, which whole-heartedly adopted his early 1970s theatricality and playful androgyny as a means to both transcend the musical limitations of punk and to imaginatively explore the possibilities of popular music as a kind of gender-fluid, transmedial art form. But it was arguably Bowie’s radical musical shift during his time in Berlin in the later 1970s – a shift strongly marked by the influence of Krautrock – that most significantly shaped the aesthetic of British post-punk.

Bowie moved from Los Angeles to Berlin in 1976 with Iggy Pop, in part to overcome a debilitating drug habit but also to flee the American music scene. Between 1976 and 1978, Bowie wrote and recorded his so-called ‘Berlin trilogy’ – the albums Low, ‘Heroes’, and Lodger – and produced Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot. These albums are celebrated for their experimental ethos, formal variety, and sonic richness, in sharp contrast to the contemporaneous back-to-basics monochrome of punk in Britain. Indeed, the sound of the revolutionary drum production on Low (which is also clearly audible on some tracks on The Idiot, such as ‘Funtime’) – facilitated by experimentation with processing the drums through an Eventide Harmoniser – has been characterised as almost single-handedly helping to sonically shape the post-punk aesthetic, and was sought after by drummers in seminal post-punk bands.Footnote ⁷ While in Germany, Bowie became enamoured with Krautrock: during the Berlin period, Bowie recounts being ‘a big fan’ of Kraftwerk, Cluster, Can, Neu!, and Harmonia – regarding Krautrock as ‘where the future of music was going’ – and he actively sought collaborations with Krautrock musicians, perhaps most notably (if unsuccessfully), Michael Rother from Neu!.Footnote ⁸

Bowie chronicler Nicholas Pegg suggests that the singer’s interest in new German music is already evident on the title track of the 1975 album Station to Station, with its ‘chilly Teutonic beat’.Footnote ⁹ But the Krautrock influence on Bowie becomes fully manifest on 1979’s Lodger, the final album in the Berlin trilogy: tracks like the galloping ‘Move On’, and especially ‘Red Sails’, with its droning harmonies and brisk motorik beat, was immediately identified by critics like Jon Savage as derived from Neu!; Bowie himself acknowledged his debt to ‘that Neu! sound’, and also seems to have borrowed heavily from Harmonia’s song ‘Monza’ for the chords and beat of ‘Red Sails’.Footnote ¹⁰

Bowie also connected with Krautrock via composer and producer Brian Eno, his main collaborator for the Berlin albums. Eno was influenced by the experimental techniques of German art music composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, as were a number of Krautrock musicians (including Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay of Can, both of whom studied composition with Stockhausen in the early 1960s). Drawing on Stockhausen, Eno – like Schmidt and Czukay – helped to build bridges between avant-garde art music and pop music. But Eno also worked directly with the Krautrock ‘supergroup’ Harmonia – comprised of members of Cluster and Neu! – in the early autumn of 1976, immediately before joining Bowie in Berlin to record Low at Hansa Studios (Eno would go on to record another ‘Krautrock’ album, Cluster & Eno, in 1977).

The influence of Krautrock, via Bowie’s personal affinity for Kraftwerk’s electronic experimentation and Eno’s immediate experience composing and performing with important Krautrock musicians, is readily apparent on Low, through its emphasis on moody ambient sound, long instrumental tracks, heavy reliance on electronics, and a shift towards more abstract and intermittent lyrics. As Sean Albiez has observed, Bowie’s Berlin albums were ‘a crucial conduit through which travelled Krautrock and pre-war hedonistic and post-war geopolitical German myths and memes that fascinated British fans and musicians’.Footnote ¹¹

Musical Teutonism? A ‘German Sound’?

Bowie’s move to Berlin and the attendant Krautrock-inspired aesthetic changes in his music can be seen as reflecting a rather un-British Germanophilia, which, I argue, is an essential element of British post-punk: even as punk was still in full swing as of 1977, the music Bowie and Iggy Pop were recording in Berlin was already poised to cast a huge shadow over the alternative popular music scene in Britain. As Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti has recounted, the Berlin albums were positively imbued with a ‘Teutonic ambience’, derived in part from the atmosphere and acoustics of the Hansa studio, but also, he insists, from simply being present in Germany and absorbing Berlin’s ‘manic energy [and] … manic aggression’, which he associates with the city’s (Nazi) history.Footnote ¹² Simon Reynolds likewise has remarked on Bowie’s shift away from American rock ’n’ roll towards a Germanic aesthetic characterised as ‘a cool and controlled sound modelled on the Teutonic motorik rhythms of Kraftwerk and Neu!’.Footnote ¹³

Reviews of Krautrock albums in the British music press in the early 1970s – many of which were decidedly ambivalent – first inscribed many of these tropes. Bands like Can are commonly described as ‘spare and stark’, possessing a ‘German sound’ and ‘Teutonic heaviness’ that is ‘often frighteningly cold’.Footnote ¹⁴ Kraftwerk, presumably because they foregrounded the use of electronic instruments, were especially singled out by the press for their perceived Germanic peccadillos, including austerity, emotionlessness, repetition, and regimentation in their music.Footnote ¹⁵

These tropes of coolness and detached Teutonism shape much of the discourse surrounding post-punk music: influential post-punk and proto-goth bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and Joy Division are sometimes given the generic designation ‘coldwave’,Footnote ¹⁶ with the heavy use of reverb, trebly and dissonant guitar sound effects, bass-dominated textures, and mechanistic rhythms contributing to the notion of a somehow cold, innately German sound.

Punk to Post-Punk: From Germanophobia to Germanophilia

Post-punk musicians, looking further afield for influences and inspiration, turned not only to Bowie but to Krautrock directly. It is now certainly becoming more common for contemporary mainstream bands to name-check Krautrock as a formative influence – U2 and Coldplay, for example – and for pop and hip-hop artists to sample from Krautrock songs – in recent years, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Daft Punk, and A Tribe Called Quest, among others. However, in the 1970s Krautrock was, as David Stubbs notes, overshadowed by disco and punk, and ‘marginal’ at a time when, especially in Britain, ‘Germanophobia still held sway, though now it took the shape of condescending amusement, rather than outright hostility’.Footnote ¹⁷ The very appellation ‘Krautrock’ makes this quite clear: it is a dismissive, if not outright offensive sobriquet, invented by British music journalists to denigrate German music.

The historian Patrick Major observes that ‘British identity in the late twentieth century appeared to have been profoundly and negatively informed by its encounter with Germany’, and that Germany ‘was the nation Britons apparently loved to hate’. He links anti-German sentiment to post-war animosity but also sees it as the core of a more generalised Euroscepticism fostered by Cold War and reunification anxieties.Footnote ¹⁸ Furthermore, as Uwe Schütte has argued, ‘perceptions of Germans and German culture in the UK continue to be dogged by old stereotypes’.Footnote ¹⁹ Today, the perpetuation of these ‘old stereotypes’ are made possible, according to Schütte, by contemporary German bands such as Rammstein, ‘who peddle silly Teutonic clichés about Germany’ and turn the German language in which they sing ‘into the parodic representation of the Nazi Germans seen in war films’.Footnote ²⁰

In the mid-1970s, the punk movement in Britain traded directly on Nazi-themed Germanophobia, thanks in large part to the efforts of punk impresario and Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren, whose infamous London boutique Sex sold Nazi regalia. Swastikas became de rigeur fashion for controversy-seeking punk rockers, notably Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols. The Pistols would also flirt with Nazi history by writing and recording songs that blended clumsy social critique with provocative references to the Holocaust, including ‘Holiday in the Sun’ and ‘Belsen Was a Gas’.

As a fashion statement, punk’s use of Nazi symbolism and paraphernalia hinted at Susan Sontag’s fascinating fascism – the aesthetic allure of totalitarianism, which she described in the New York Review of Books in 1975Footnote ²¹ – but much of it was merely tasteless, anti-establishment provocation, trading in part on reflexive anti-German sentiment in Britain and, in the case of McLaren and The Sex Pistols, simply ‘us[ing] the swastika as an instrument of boorishness and to profess total ignorance about the events and political movements referenced by their clothing’.Footnote ²² Indeed, McLaren himself was Jewish, as was Sid Vicious’ girlfriend Nancy Spungen.Footnote ²³ John Lydon has since disavowed ‘Belsen Was a Gas’ as a nasty song that never should have been released. In the immediate wake of punk, much of the music that sprung to life was, though catalysed by punk, in fact Germanophilic: while Stubbs characterises this impulse more generically as ‘Europhilia’, part of a turning away from the strictures of British culture, I would argue that it is clearly German music that is attractive to the early generation of post-punk groups, who are ultimately responsible for Krautrock’s resurrection in the late 1970s as a ‘legend, a posthumous phenomenon’.Footnote ²⁴

Punk Rock versus Krautrock, I: Public Image Ltd.

The shift from punk to post-punk as a shift underwritten by Krautrock-inspired Germanophilia can readily be seen in the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Public Image Ltd. (or PIL, John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols project). PIL is perhaps the UK post-punk band most often directly linked with Krautrock. Lydon left the Sex Pistols in 1978, forming a new band with bassist Jah Wobble, guitarist Keith Levene, and drummer Jim Walker. PIL eschewed the controversy and increasing commercialism of punk, focusing instead on music-making, bringing to the fore two of Lydon’s great musical interests: dub reggae and Krautrock (Stubbs calls Lydon a ‘Krautrock fanatic’Footnote ²⁵).

The band’s first album, First Issue (1978), is rough, with the band’s direction clearly not yet certain. The second album, however, Metal Box (1979), saw the band take a decisive turn towards the avant-garde. The group’s sound is bass-dominated, reflecting the influence of dub, but also drawing from Krautrock: bassist Jah Wobble was, along with Lydon, a Krautrock enthusiast whose bass playing was directly inspired by Can bassist Holger Czukay. Wobble would indeed leave PIL after recording Metal Box, and would go on to collaborate with Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit on the 1982 record Full Circle.Footnote ²⁶

The utopian ethos of PIL – a band determined to improve the world with their emphasis on a liberal worldview and democratic creative processes – was well aligned with Krautrock’s political optimism, desire for social change, and emphasis on self-expression. In his desire to experiment with unconstrained creativity – and especially, in pursuit of a freedom from rules and what Albiez describes as an ‘avant-garde noise aesthetic’ that The Sex Pistols failed to achieve – Lydon negotiated a path through a disparate array of stylistic influences, chief among them Krautrock, looking especially to Can and Neu!.Footnote ²⁷ Lydon’s other key collaborator, guitarist Keith Levene, was likewise a Krautrock devotee, developing anti-rock, quasi-improvisational, noise-based guitar techniques derived from both prog rock and Krautrock; moreover, as Albiez notes, ‘Levene also had an interest in technical innovation, synthesisers and, with Lydon, new studio recording strategies and techniques antithetical to punk notions of immediacy (but sharing much in common with progressive Krautrock).’Footnote ²⁸

The first song on Metal Box, ‘Albatross’, reflects the shared aesthetic vision of Lydon, Wobble, and Levene while pointing towards Krautrock with its repetitive, droning bass line, strict four-on-the-floor drums, Lydon’s cryptic, doomily intoned lyrics, and metallic, ambient guitar noise. It is the antithesis of punk in many ways, especially with respect to its length: it is nearly eleven minutes long, with virtually no formal changes, similar to many Krautrock tracks. Other songs, like ‘No Birds’, drive forward rhythmically, hinting strongly at Neu!, while ‘Socialist’ recalls some of the proto-punk freneticism of Can. ‘Memories’ and ‘Graveyard’ sound like a bizarre merger of Krautrock, dub, and disco. Julian Cope tacitly suggests an organic link between PIL and Krautrock, citing Lydon’s gnosticism and unconstrained creativity and self-exploration: Cope ultimately proposes a compelling counterfactual, namely that ‘Krautrock is what Punk would have been if Johnny Rotten alone would have been in charge.’Footnote ²⁹

Punk Rock versus Krautrock, II: Siouxsie and the Banshees

Siouxsie Sioux’s rise to fame began with her membership in the so-called ‘Bromley Contingent’, a group of die-hard Sex Pistols fans and early leaders of the British punk movement. Siouxsie (née Susan Janet Ballion) formed Siouxsie and the Banshees in late 1976, with bassist Steve Severin, drummer Kenny Morris, and guitarist Peter Fenton (soon replaced by John McKay). The group began gigging in early 1977, and released their first album, the critically-acclaimed The Scream, in late 1978. Early on, Siouxsie rode the punk wave of Germanophobia as a self-confessed proponent of Nazi chic: in 1976, she could be seen dressed as a Nazi dominatrix, wearing leather bondage gear with a swastika armband, admitting: ‘I have to be honest but I do like the Nazi uniform. I shouldn’t say it but I think it’s a very good-looking uniform.’Footnote ³⁰ In addition, as the cultural historian Roger Sabin recounts, Sioux’s ‘goose-stepping and right-arm salutes on stage’ likewise brought a Nazi-inspired aesthetic to the fore.Footnote ³¹ She had originally included the line ‘Too many Jews for my liking’ in the Banshees song ‘Love in a Void’ before the lyrics were changed so it could be recorded for Polydor and released as a single in 1979. Like John Lydon, Sioux would later minimise her – and punk’s – flirtation with Nazism, asserting:

Turning away from Nazi symbolism as a means to provoke, Banshees bassist Steve Severin would insist that the band’s musical aesthetic was in fact derived in large part from the influence of 1970s German popular culture, and specifically from Kraftwerk, Can, and Neu!Footnote ³³ The band would further eschew their earlier promotion of Germanophobia by recording songs like ‘Israel’, which seems rather like a hymn of atonement and a disavowal of Nazi chic (Siouxsie took to wearing a Star of David around this time), and ‘Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)’, which was inspired by and celebrated the anti-Nazi German cartoonist John Heartfield.

‘Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)’, which is included on The Scream but was first heard in December 1977, recorded for the BBC’s John Peel radio show, points musically at Krautrock roots through its metronomic – if not motorik – drumming, and drone-like oscillation between two chords. Other songs on The Scream, like the opening track, ‘Pure’, is a haunting instrumental, strongly reminiscent of some of Harmonia’s ambient tracks, with dissonant guitar effects and glissandi, some rattling percussion, and a repetitive, melodic bass line. An early review of The Scream in the New Musical Express immediately recognised Krautrock’s influence on the Banshees, identifying its ‘anti-rock ’n’ roll’ ethos, and drawing a direct line to Can’s 1971 Tago Mago album, with some Velvet Underground mixed in for good measure.Footnote ³⁴

The slow-building song ‘Tenant’, from the 1980 Banshees’ album Kaleidoscope, sounds unmistakably like Neu!, with Siouxsie Sioux intoning lyrics over a drone-like bass line, a tinny guitar part repeating muted chords, and a steady, unembellished medium-tempo drum track that seems haunted by a motorik pattern that almost, but never quite fully emerges. ‘Lunar Camel’, from the same album, uses a drum machine and synthesiser, creating a spare and icy sonic landscape suggesting an admixture of Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. The Banshees’ anti-rock ethos and signature sound from this period – tribal drumming featuring steady eighth note patterns on the tom-toms, a guitar sound moving away from standard chording to thinner, atmospheric, increasingly dissonant parts, and the bass guitar shifting into the foreground to become a melodic instrument – was a key element of the sonic paradigm shift of post-punk, and of the nascent gothic rock movement, discussed in the next section (though the Banshees insist they were never a goth band). This shift was shaped by Krautrock.

Joy Division and Bauhaus: From Krautrock to Goth Rock?

An additional example of a Krautrock-inspired Germanophilic shift in post-punk music can be seen and heard in the evolution of the Manchester band Joy Division, arguably one of the most influential bands of the post-punk era.Footnote ³⁵ Inspired by The Sex Pistols and David Bowie, the group began performing as Warsaw in 1977, later adapting the name Joy Division – a reference to Nazi concentration camp brothels – from the pulp novel House of Dolls.Footnote ³⁶ The band’s Germanness/Germanophobia-via-Nazism was initially very provocative, clearly intending to shock, in the punk vein: the band not only adopted gratuitous umlauts on their early albums, but infamously invoked Rudolf Heß at gigs and in songs (as in the early single ‘Warsaw’), adopted a fascistic style of dress, and used Nazi-inspired imagery for the cover of their first EP as Joy Division, An Ideal for Living.Footnote ³⁷

But the band’s final album, Closer, reflected a much subtler ‘Holocaust piety … rather than the more impious approach to Holocaust representation that characterised early punk bands’, in the form of a powerful expression of empathy for the victims of the Nazi genocide, abstracted into the band’s signature general suffering and existential angst, which served in part to emphasise the necessity of an historical reckoning with the atrocities of the past in order to confront violence in contemporary society.Footnote ³⁸

In terms of Joy Divison’s musical sound and style, the band’s former drummer, Stephen Morris, avers that, like many young musicians in the mid-1970s, he was excited by American proto-punk, and was actively seeking alternatives to shop-worn, blues-based rock. Ultimately, however, he turned to Krautrock, and bands like Can, Neu!, and Amon Düül for inspiration.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, Morris’s playing with Joy Division represents perhaps one of the strongest examples of Krautrock’s influence on the aesthetic of post-punk, as it blends looping motorik patterns with the cool, detached sound of a drum machine (achieved in part by recording each drum in the kit separately).

Tracks like ‘She’s Lost Control’ and ‘Isolation’ exemplify this: quasi-motorik beats are played on a drum kit that includes Synare synthesiser drum pads and heavily effected acoustic drums, with Morris effectively becoming a human drum machine, his rigid rhythmic patterns underpinning repetitive, harmonically static melodic bass lines. The first three minutes of the early track ‘No Love Lost’ from the An Ideal for Living EP, comprising a noisy, one-chord vamp over a clear motorik beat, could easily be mistaken for Neu! Moreover, one of Joy Division’s best-known tracks, ‘Atmosphere’, sounds uncannily like Neu!’s ‘Seeland’, with its washy synthesisers and droning harmonies oscillating between tonic and subdominant chords. As the music journalist Chris O’Leary has noted, Bowie and Iggy Pop provide here a key link in the chain between Krautrock and post-punk: ‘Atmosphere’ is itself a distillation of the 1977 Pop/Bowie song ‘Mass Production’, which obviously takes its structural, harmonic, and textural cues from Neu!’s ‘Seeland.’ As O’Leary asserts, ‘Joy Division, and others, starts here.’Footnote ⁴⁰

Joy Division are sometimes credited with the advent of gothic rock, due in large part to the band’s lyrics and sound: through performance and production, the group, along with producer Martin Hannett, organically blended lyrics about alienation, isolation, and suicidal ideation with musical analogues created through experimental production effects. However, the Northampton band Bauhaus, formed in 1978, would become famous as the originary goth band – the ‘godfathers of goth’ – courtesy of their first single, the vampire rock anthem ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, which combines clattering drums, heavily treated with dub-inspired echo, chilly, reverberant vocals, and swirling guitar effects, held together by a lugubrious descending bass line.

While the band’s singer, Peter Murphy, along with guitarist Daniel Ash were openly channelling glam-era Bowie, the influence of Krautrock is also clearly audible: Bauhaus’ drummer, Kevin Haskins, took his cue directly from Krautrock-inspired post-punk drummers like Joy Division’s Stephen Morris and Kenny Morris, the original drummer of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Haskins, like Morris, incorporated Synare pads in his drum kit, and emulated Krautrock’s patterned loops and mechanistic rhythms and tempi. Bauhaus – again, evidently seeking to channel Bowie – also looked to Brian Eno, recording a cover of his song ‘Third Uncle’, itself audibly Krautrock-inspired, with its up-tempo motorik drum track, nonsensical droning vocals, echoing bass guitar, and repeating two-chord vamp.

Bauhaus may be one of the most Germanophilic bands of the post-punk era – as the group’s name suggests; the band also drew heavily on German Expressionist cinema for their visual aesthetic – but perhaps also best exemplify the Krautrock ethos in the post-punk scene, insisting on the primacy of simple musical ideas, the purity of improvisational and collaborative composition, and the ideals of newness, of starting with a blank page and eschewing rock traditions; or, as Bauhaus bassist David Haskins insisted, making future music from out of the ‘void’.Footnote ⁴¹

Conclusion

I have argued here that post-punk clearly owes a debt to Krautrock, but it is also obviously the case that Krautrock owes something to post-punk: namely, to the raft of British post-punk bands – the ones I have discussed in this chapter, but also other important post-punk groups like Killing Joke, Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall, Simple Minds, and U2, and perhaps especially Julian Cope via his Krautrocksampler book – that helped to bring Krautrock to the ears of anglophone audiences. There is, moreover, a powerful synergy that exists between Krautrock and post-punk, which manifests itself in the stylistic diversity that characterises both genres. It is also clear that both genres have in common a strange and enduring influence, as they continue to shape the sound of popular music well into the twenty-first century.

Essential Listening

• Bauhaus, In the Flat Field (Beggar’s Banquet, 1980)

• David Bowie, Lodger (RCA, 1979)

• Joy Division, An Ideal for Living (Enigma, 1978)

• Public Image Ltd, Metal Box (Virgin, 1979)

• Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Scream (Polydor, 1978)

Under the umbrella of the Krautrock movement, young German bands looked outside the nation’s borders for inspiration. They incorporated a wide range of musical influences into their studio experimentations, which cultivated a remarkable diversity and eclecticism within the genre. This desire to uncover hitherto unheard sounds, as it were, resulted in the emergence of many innovative musical styles. Furthermore, the experimental spirit of the Krautrock era led both rock and jazz musicians to merge the two styles, resulting in homegrown free jazz and kraut fusion movements.

This injection of black music into Krautrock left a noticeable imprint on Krautrock and resulted in one particularly impactful line of development, namely the emergence of the automated machine funk of Kraftwerk. The band’s electronic sound eventually fed back into black communities in the United States, triggering the conception of electro and Detroit techno. This chapter explores the legacy of Krautrock through the aforementioned genres, and the intersection of German experimentation with black American musicians and communities. It hence tells a paradigmatic story of the mutual interchangeability of musical forms that travel transnationally between nations, cultures, social groups, undergoing processes of adaptation and hybridisations that in turn spark the development of new musical genres.

Krautrock: The 4×4 Beat and Funk’s Seedlings

As Krautrock transcended Germany’s borders, its widespread transnational reception influenced the conception and development of new genres to varying degrees. Krautrock’s fusion of electronic equipment with more traditional acoustic instruments broke new ground in the way that bands performed and recorded. The audacious experimentation by early Krautrock bands began to evolve, with key elements distilled into new variations encompassing folk, politically charged lyrics, unorthodox arrangement, minimalism, the integration of electronic synthesisers, and much more.

Of particular significance is the impactful cultural influence exerted by Krautrock on the conception of styles of electronic dance music developed by African American communities in the early-to-mid-1980s. This particularly concerns house and techno music. House emerged in the Chicago area in the post-disco era, named after the city’s Warehouse nightclub – a popular nightclub among Chicago’s black gay community – where DJ Frankie Knuckles was musical director. Later, the Warehouse closed and the venue was renamed Music Box. Ron Hardy became the nightclub’s resident DJ, continuing the progressive music policy established by Frankie Knuckles. Among the key producers of the era were Larry Heard, Chip E, Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk, Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley, and Phuture. The group Phuture included DJ Pierre, who pioneered the ‘acid’ sound, using Roland’s TR-303 synthesiser to create the distinct squelchy effect that defines acid house.Footnote ¹

Techno, meanwhile, had its origins in post-industrial Detroit and, parallel to house music, was also developed by young black artists. Juan Atkins and his high-school friends Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May (known as the Belleville Three) experimented with electronic synthesisers. Atkins had already had local and international success with his Cybotron project, which preceded his solo project as Model 500. Under this alias, he shifted from electro into what he defined as ‘techno’, or ‘technology music’, setting up the Metroplex label to self-release his music. A key venue for Atkins and his cohorts to showcase their music was the Detroit Music Institute.Footnote ²

It is specifically this channel of transnational migration of music that will be explored here. How did the influence of German bands from the Krautrock era permeate into Detroit and connect with black communities? As hinted, a line can be traced right back to the early years of Krautrock, with free jazz among a number of – often overlooked – influences that lie at the genre’s foundations. Free jazz, a radical subsection within the United States’ jazz movement, emerged in the late 1950s as a form of music conceived and developed by African Americans. Musicians like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, an improvisation virtuoso who pioneered a radical piano playing technique, were at its forefront. Similarly, Coleman’s progressive (and controversial at the time) saxophone playing inspired the free jazz movement. Of particular note was his open-ended approach to melody and harmony.Footnote ³

Members of several prominent Krautrock bands had experience of playing and performing free jazz prior to forming their respective groups. Jaki Liebezeit and Michael Karoli of Can both came from a free jazz background.Footnote ⁴ Drummer Klaus Dinger of duo Neu! performed free jazz. His motorik drumbeat proved an essential component of the automated nature of the music that came out of Düsseldorf.Footnote ⁵ Mani Neumeier was also a free jazz drummer before he joined Guru Guru.

As can be seen, the German free jazz scene – which orbited around key proponents such as saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, trumpet player Manfred Schoof, and pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach – constituted an important pool of musical innovators feeding the subsequent Krautrock scene. Drums were an intrinsic component of Krautrock, following on from their rise to prominence in free jazz. Drumming came to the fore thanks to free jazz, where the instrument was given more credence, beyond a mere timekeeping component, as it had been up until the conception of free jazz. In German free jazz and Krautrock, drums have equal standing with the rest of the instruments in the ensemble.

But German free jazz, being an imitation, or adoption, of a style originated by black Americans, was not the only source of influence for Krautrock. Black music was also enmeshed in the shift into kraut fusion, led by bands like Embryo, Xhol Caravan, and Kraan. Each of these groups incorporated a distinctly black influence into their music. Embryo are considered pioneers of kraut fusion, an offshoot that fused other styles of music onto the Krautrock framework, most commonly jazz and funk. Their album Steig aus (Get off, 1973) featured American jazz pianist Mal Waldron on electric piano. Embryo explored musical styles from outside their home nation, paying visits to Africa and India to get first-hand experience of music from those countries.Footnote ⁶

Xhol Caravan featured three Americans among its line-up,Footnote ⁷ including African American Gilbert ‘Skip’ van Wyck on drums. The group initially played covers of artists like Otis Redding and James Brown – as heard on their Soul Caravan – Live LP from 1969 – before they moved in a more psychedelic direction and incorporated jazz into their rock-inspired compositions. This demonstrates how black music merged with German influences, with the aid of players with African American heritage, and the key musical touchpoints for these pioneering bands. Simultaneously, these bands rejected standardised Anglo-American structures, which had come to dominate the musical landscape in the 1960s, when they first began performing.Footnote ⁸ In doing so, they sketched out an entirely new rock template, which allowed for freeform expression and the hybridisation of styles, evident throughout their work.

As well as jazz, Ulm-based band Kraan also began to imbue their compositions with elements of funk. This can be heard on their LP Wintrup (1972), where songs such as ‘Mind Quake’ and ‘Backs’ feature funk-influenced basslines. James Brown and his peers developed funk in the United States during the mid to late 1960s. By the 1970s, it had been popularised and reached European shores, with hits like Brown’s ‘Sex Machine (Get On Up)’ (1970) charting in Britain and Germany.

Kraftwerk, too, took inspiration from James Brown’s funk rhythms.Footnote ⁹ In keeping with the ethos of Krautrock, the Düsseldorf group experimented with a variety of outside influences, including Tamla/Motown, and Detroit rock bands MC5 and The Stooges. Most pertinent to their connection to Detroit, though, is the underlying notion of funk. The black music styles that were present in the roots of Krautrock feed into the conception of techno in the mid-1980s, through the music of Kraftwerk. As one of the key acts namechecked by the foremost architects of Detroit techno, Kraftwerk are the bridge between Krautrock and the city’s innovative form of electronic music.

The Socio-economic Background to the Evolution of Home Technology

The emergence of new, pioneering forms of black music based more on technology than conventional musicianship, is closely linked to the socio-economic background of 1980s Detroit. The city was amid huge social and economic upheaval as its automotive industry was in a state of collapse. An economic depression across the city, especially for its black population, created a need for escapism. Detroit’s automotive industry, which gave it its nickname ‘Motor City’, started to decline in the 1950s. Thousands of employees were laid off, and the city suffered from rising crime rates, a low tax base, and what has been termed ‘white flight’, as many of the city’s white occupants either fled to the suburbs or left the city altogether.Footnote ¹⁰ The result was a ghettoisation of parts of Detroit.Footnote ¹¹

Black unemployment in the United States has consistently been twice as high as that of its white population, going as far back as the 1960s, reaching a peak of 19.5 per cent for black people and 8.4 per cent for white people in 1983. In 2013, it was still 13.4 and 6.7 per cent, respectively.Footnote ¹² Detroit’s ‘depression’ of the 1970s and 1980s led to mass unemployment and a decaying city, where abandoned buildings and high crime rates became the norm. The dire economic circumstances in which many people lived was the catalyst behind a need for escapism. Creativity, imagination, and looking to the future for hope and optimism became important factors in the drive to develop new cultural expressions based on music and dancing.

Detroit techno emerged as a counter to the city’s post-industrial collapse. The impact of the collapse of the city’s automotive industry led to action in various tiers of Detroit’s administration to portray it in a more positive light. Similarly, Detroit techno gave the city cause to celebrate, through events like the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (now known as Movement Detroit).Footnote ¹³

Disco had its reign in the United States during the mid-1970s but a nationwide commercial backlash against the music, using the slogan ‘Disco Sucks’, led to its downfall. However, the popularity of the music primed the listening public for the arrival of electronic dance music, with its structured 4 × 4 beats, hypnotic arrangements, and pioneering electro-disco artists such as Giorgio Moroder and Cerrone. Both producers fused influences from soul and disco with synthesisers to cultivate a fresh new sound that arrived a few years after Kraftwerk were laying the groundwork for their own purely electronic sound from the mid-1970s onwards.

In Detroit, the post-disco era heralded a highly fertile and eclectic period, where DJs such as Ken Collier blended a range of sounds from Eurodisco and Italo disco to new wave, industrial, synth pop, and more. A melting pot of sounds was absorbed into the consciousness of the city’s party communities at parties like Gables, run by Todd Johnson. These parties were mostly attended by middle-class high-school kids who coveted European fashion and music – a rejection of ‘ghetto’ styles.Footnote ¹⁴

Globally, advances in technology were rapidly revolutionising the way that society operated, with post-war science-fiction fantasies gradually becoming reality. Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the moon on 20 July 1969 was a historic moment that united the world. Microchips offered a glimpse into the next phase of technological evolution: smaller gadgets and devices, portability, and the potential for humans to be augmented. Technology not only offered hope and safety, but it also presented the possibility of a democratised society, where equal opportunities could become a reality.

In the area of music production, the synthesiser became emblematic of the potential offered by new technology. Though hugely expensive at first, affluent German bands such as Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream used them to create their otherworldly kosmische Musik. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider from Kraftwerk adopted the new technology most eagerly, evolving from their Krautrock roots into a conceptual art project. Though Kraftwerk took a critical stance in reflecting the new technological age by envisioning how machines would shape the future, their firm hope – not least in view of the nation’s Nazi past – was that technology would help to build a better, equal society.

Such hope mirrored the situation of socially and economically deprived African Americans in Detroit. Amid a depression, the cultural movement of Afro-Futurism, which harks back in its musical component to the pioneering ‘space jazz’ of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, provided the opportunity to envision a better future thanks to technology.Footnote ¹⁵ Accordingly, science-fiction fantasies involving a future offering a clean slate, and a chance to rebuild the world anew, devoid of racial and social barriers, abounded, and served as a cultural interface to the ‘future music’ originating from Germany.

Hip-Hop and Electro: First Contact with The Robots

Hip-hop had been steadily developing since the early 1970s, with block parties, graffiti writing, and breakdancing flourishing in New York’s ghettos and, by the beginning of the 1980s, it was a fully formed culture.Footnote ¹⁶ Preceding the development of techno, electro – a branch of hip-hop – encompassed the ‘future funk’ that emanated from the electronic music-producing machines operated by Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and other German bands. Employing the TR-808 drum machine, manufactured by Japanese company Roland, electro (or electro-funk, as it was also known) utilised its science-fiction sounds and effects to cultivate futuristic sonics.

Hip-hop culture comprises ‘four pillars’: rapping/MCing, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti. Each of the four pillars evolved prior to the development of electro. However, when the music emerged, breakdancers invented moves that complemented the music – the robot, which mimicked the mechanical movements associated with robots, and the electric boogaloo, which was a much smoother, flowing style of movement, and body popping/locking, where the dancer’s make stiff, purposeful movements, while other parts of the body remain still. The notion of rigid robotic funk connects back to Kraftwerk’s concept of artistic harmony between musicians and the electronic equipment they are using, or in other words: to musically merge humans and machines. According to Uwe Schütte, ‘Robots, as mechanical doppelgängers of the band, and the conceptual notion of the man-machine are of course closely linked. … Clearly, the notion of the robot is deeply futuristic, as it epitomizes the potential moment of evolution at which man and technology would merge.’Footnote ¹⁷

The most widely acknowledged connection between Kraftwerk and the roots of electro comes via ‘Planet Rock’ (1982) by Afrika Bambaataa and Arthur Baker. Baker was hugely influential in the development of electro in the 1980s, channelling his knowledge and expertise into a myriad production and engineering endeavours. His key releases of the time include ‘I.O.U’ by Freeez (1983), ‘Play At Your Own Risk’ by Planet Patrol (1982) and, his most famous work, ‘Planet Rock’ with Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force.

The seminal release is a direct link to Kraftwerk, using the beats from their single ‘Nummern’ (Numbers, 1981) and the eerie synthesiser melody from ‘Trans Europa Express’ (1977). Bambaataa was DJing at block parties in the Bronx, presenting his audiences with an eclectic selection of music, which included funk, soul, and early hip-hop, alongside pioneering electronic music artists such as Gary Numan, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Kraftwerk. Highly influential New York radio DJ Frankie Crocker played Kraftwerk records on his WBLS show, which also helped popularise the group with his largely black listenership. Similarly, the radio show by Detroit’s Electrifying Mojo also featured the German group on regular rotation.

Baker grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, becoming a DJ in the 1970s, and discovered Kraftwerk while digging for records.Footnote ¹⁸ Both Baker and Bambaataa were enamoured with Kraftwerk’s ability to combine funk and soul with futurism. They worked with multi-instrumentalist John Robie, who interpolated Kraftwerk’s music so well that many people mistakenly thought Baker and Bambaataa had sampled the German group. At the time, sampling – copying parts of a song and repurposing them in your own productions – was still very much in its infancy, but soon after became a key component in hip-hop, and the wider electronic music industry. In any case, Kraftwerk made legal demands and received royalties.

‘Planet Rock’ was a big hit when it was released in 1982 and remains an all-time hip-hop/electro classic, its influence reaching beyond New York’s hip-hop scene to inspire artists around the world. The song was also the first hip-hop record to utilise Roland’s TR-808 drum machine. In a 2012 interview Bambaataa stated:

Cybotron: Architects of Techno Funk

Electro precedes techno by a few years. Its inception in the early 1980s would lead to the birth of techno, with the artist credited with coining the term ‘techno’, Juan Atkins, originally producing electro music himself. Born and raised in Detroit, Juan Atkins adopted the Cybotron moniker with his friend Richard Davis in 1981. The duo released several records that employed synthesisers creating music with similar tropes to the electro sound coming out of New York, but with their own darker twist.

In 1981, they released ‘Alleys Of Your Mind’ (1981) on their label Deep Space. This was followed by ‘Cosmic Cars’ (1982) and their biggest hit ‘Clear’ (1983), an all-time electro classic. ‘Clear’ features a rising and falling melody lifted straight from Kraftwerk’s ‘Spiegelsaal’ (Hall of Mirrors). Again, like ‘Planet Rock’, Atkins played the riff himself, rather than sample it: ‘I recreated it. I think that at the time, samples weren’t even in existence.’Footnote ²⁰ Atkins’s philosophy had its grounding in futurism, with Alvin Toffler’s books Future Shock (1984) and The Third Wave (1981) key influences in his outlook. Davis, also an outlier, created the terminology connected to their project: the name Cybotron for instance, a combination of the words cyborg and cyclotron.

Fellow Detroit pioneer, Jeff Mills, characterised the popularity of futurist thinking in the black community in Detroit thus:

Mills is one of the exponents of techno who has pushed it furthest into the future. He aimed to express a sense of futurism in his music, realised in numerous conceptual productions and performances. Mills even composed a soundtrack to Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis in 2000, a film that also greatly inspired Kraftwerk, in the visual direction of the video for ‘Trans Europa Express’, for example, and the band’s fascination with retro-futurism.Footnote ²²

Automation and the Universal Appeal of Machine-Funk

The metronomic beat used by Krautrock bands set it apart from more traditional rock, which commonly used a backbeat. This rhythm was referred to as motorik.Footnote ²³ Neu!’s drummer Klaus Dinger pioneered this ‘machine-like’ 4 × 4 beat. His work with the Düsseldorf band radically reinvented the rock template, discarding unnecessary flourishes and focusing on a more minimalistic approach to drum patterns. Automation, or industrial rhythm, is the language that binds Kraftwerk’s music to Motor City and it has been at the core of a sonic dialogue that has been occurring since the group’s early stages.

Both Detroit and Düsseldorf have histories that have been deeply impacted by their industrial nature. Automation, monotony, and the hypnotic power of repetition were core characteristics of Kraftwerk’s compositions. Their synthesisers afforded them the ability to programme beats and repeat them perfectly for as long as they wanted, something that is virtually impossible for humans. This repetition was present in the industrial belt of Düsseldorf and Detroit’s factories, where mechanised sounds were prevalent – robots and machines programmed to perform monotonous actions as part of the automated manufacturing process. As Hütter explained: ‘It has always interested us to make industrial music. Assembly line music. Production processes, which are all around us in the industrial world.’Footnote ²⁴ Within this rigid, robotic monotony was an innate, hypnotic ‘funk’. This trance-inducing repetition forms the blueprint of modern dance music; disco, house, techno, drum ’n’ bass, dubstep, trance, and many of their offshoots.

According to Hütter: ‘The dynamism of the machines, the “soul” of the machines, has always been part of our music. Trance always belong to repetition, and everybody is looking for trance in life etc., in sex, in the emotional, in pleasure, in anything … Machines produce an absolutely perfect trance.’Footnote ²⁵ Finding soul, groove, and funk in apparently soulless machines is one of Kraftwerk’s great achievements.

What must also be considered when speaking about the connection between the United States’ black communities and Kraftwerk is the way in which the German group’s music transcended racial categorisation. It balanced American rhythms and European melody, as epitomised in Kraftwerk’s conceptual notion of electronic pop music and the myriad influences that were fed into their machines and regurgitated as a more universal sonic language, liberated from the constraints of national identity. Robots are often depicted as genderless representations of the human form. Similarly, machines have no race or gender. By using them as a channel for their broad spectrum of inspirations, Kraftwerk connected with multiple audiences; black people in Detroit, gay Latinos in New York, people who didn’t fit the racially and sexually homogenised mainstream. This was a counter to the dominance of rock music of that era, which embodied a very definite sense of whiteness and masculinity. Not only did Kraftwerk’s music transcend race and gender, but it also evoked a very global, transnational appeal, with the band including various languages on tracks such as ‘Nummern’ or ‘Techno Pop’.Footnote ²⁶

‘Our music is good if blacks and whites can dance to it at the same time’, Hütter once explained.Footnote ²⁷ François Kevorkian, who also worked on their Electric Cafe LP (1986), observed the universal appeal of Kraftwerk’s music first-hand while immersed in New York’s vibrant underground club scene in the 1980s: ‘What was really remarkable was that their music … had that ability to cross over between all the different scenes. Kraftwerk was, like, universal.’Footnote ²⁸

Tim Barr commented on the ‘extraordinarily funky bass line’ on ‘Kristallo’ (1973), and that Kraftwerk had ‘obviously been paying close attention to the bass parts played by Bootsy Collins on their favourite James Brown records’.Footnote ²⁹ Former member Karl Bartos confirms this, explaining that, in the 1970s, ‘we were all fans of American music: soul, the whole Tamla/Motown thing, and of course, James Brown’.Footnote ³⁰ Atkins commented on his meeting with Schneider at British outdoor rave Tribal Gathering in 1997:

Interestingly, Kraftwerk hired a black engineer from Detroit to work on the final master of Mensch-Maschine (Man-Machine). Leanard Jackson had no idea Kraftwerk were white until he met them in Düsseldorf.Footnote ³² Black artists sampling Kraftwerk add up to a considerable list, amongst them as Trouble Funk, Digital Underground, Cookie Crew, Doug Lazy, Kiss AMC, The Fearless Four, Eskimos and Egypt, and Borghesia.Footnote ³³ The website whosampledwho.com provides more examples, including black music icons like Dr Dre, Timbaland, Sir Mix-a-Lot, Ultramagnetic MC’s, Underground Resistance, the late Biz Markie, and others.

The Electrifying Mojo, P-Funk, and the Mothership Connection

The universal appeal of electronic music and its faceless presentation via the radio, meant listeners to influential hosts such as The Electrifying Mojo were often unaware of the racial identity of the musicians he supported. Johnson’s reverence and eclectic curation is what Carl Craig describes as the mix of music at the root of techno: ‘Techno is that attitude in the music that Mojo was playing that influenced me as a kid. Techno is that cross section – that mix of music that influenced what we know as Detroit techno.’Footnote ³⁴ Johnson’s ethos was to counter the dominance of commercial organisations.

Kraftwerk were among the many avant-garde artists Mojo showcased on his show. Like Frankie Crocker in New York and his peers at WMBX in Chicago, Johnson pioneered a multi-genre approach which tapped into the automated funk that emanated from Kraftwerk’s music:

Kraftwerk’s music had been relegated to ‘production fodder’ (i.e. background music) by station management at WGPR but it was salvaged by Johnson and played on his show. A video clip on YouTube demonstrates how well Kraftwerk’s music connected with black audiences.Footnote ³⁷ Broadcast on local TV station WGPR-TV (the television department of WGPR radio, where Johnson hosted his show) The New Dance Show clip features its audience split in two, with audience members parading down the middle – a format copied from the show Soul Train – dancing to Kraftwerk’s ‘Nummern’.

Juan Atkins remembers that the first time he heard Kraftwerk’s track ‘Die Roboter’ (‘The Robots’) ‘I just froze. This sounded like the future, and it was fascinating […] there were other funky electronic bands around – Tangerine Dream and Gary Numan and all that – but none were as funky as Kraftwerk.’Footnote ³⁸ Atkins was also influenced by the P-Funk of Parliament Funkadelic, another pivotal group from the seventies whose fantasy-based imagery, and visual presentation (stage and costume design), envisioned black people in space – developing their own brand of psychedelic Afro-Futurism.

Here we can trace the family tree from Motown to James Brown, Kraftwerk, Parliament, and Detroit techno. Members of Parliament (Maceo Parker, Bootsy Collins) were part of James Brown’s band The JBs. Parliament frontman George Clinton was a songwriter at Motown, which also influenced Kraftwerk. Mike Banks, of pioneering Detroit techno group Underground Resistance (with Jeff Mills and, later, Robert Hood), was a former studio musician who worked with Parliament. Like Kraftwerk, Underground Resistance adopted a similarly media-averse outlook, and eventually remixed the German group’s track ‘Expo2000’. Banks refers to Kraftwerk’s key track ‘Nummern’ as ‘the secret code of electronic funk’: ‘That track hit home in Detroit so hard. They had just created the perfect urban music because it was controlled chaos, and that’s exactly what we live in.’Footnote ³⁹

Another Detroit outfit that took great inspiration from Kraftwerk is Drexciya. A duo made up of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, who defied music marketing norms to adopt a totally anonymous identity. They never performed live and operated exclusively from Stinson’s basement studio, shunning the limelight to focus purely on their music. Stinson and Donald created an entire world and mythology around their Drexciya concept; based around the idea that an underwater colony of aquatic humanoids evolved from the babies of pregnant slave women, thrown overboard during the trek across the Middle Passage (the journey from Europe to the USA).Footnote ⁴⁰

There are very clear nods to Kraftwerk in some of the track titles and terminology (such as the track title ‘Aquabahn’ clearly alluding to ‘Autobahn’) used in their material. Later, under one of the many aliases associated with the Drexciya project, Elekctroids, they paid respects to their German inspirations with a note in their press release from their 1995 LP Elektroworld: ‘This album, titled elektro world, is a personal, tribute to those well known pioneers of the electro-disco-beat; Kraftwerk.’Footnote ⁴¹ This homage to the German group not only demonstrates the influence of their robotic funk on black electronic music artists in Detroit but also shows how their conceptual approach had an influence on the generations that followed.

Short Conclusion: Universal Funk and Electronic Spirituality

The transnational flow of musically encoded ideas and concepts between Detroit and Europe hints at a deeper connection. The notion of universal funk pervades throughout Krautrock, the music that influenced it and the music it inspired. Beyond superficial physical identity such as gender, nationality, racial categorisation, and other such limiting signifiers of identity, music is a vehicle for the human experience. As we’ve seen, machines transcend fixed identity, the listener is presented with sounds that trigger universal responses, memories, thoughts, feelings, and reactions. Accordingly, Ralf Hütter himself hence described the connection between Detroit and Düsseldorf, Germany as ‘spiritual’:

The continued interest in Krautrock several decades after its emergence is testament to its lasting influence and historical importance. Despite a vastly different musical and commercial landscape today, search engine data shows that Krautrock has sustained a wide-reaching interest across English-speaking countries, Europe, Russia, and South America.Footnote ¹ Yet, most academic work on the topic has largely focused on the canonical artists and albums first associated with the term, with less said about the role of Krautrock in music today. In their respective discussions, Ulrich Adelt, John Littlejohn, and Jan Reetze all provide examples of contemporary Krautrock, but draw primarily from the later work of established bands who were active in Germany during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ²

Earlier in this volume, Adelt highlights difficulties with thinking of Krautrock as a single coherent musical practice, yet our engagement, too, with Krautrock today is markedly different from the period in which it was first conceived. This is true both in terms of the contemporary musical landscape and listeners’ ways of engaging with music. Historically, Krautrock was encountered by an English-speaking audience primarily in a recorded format and was mediated by publishers and importers who could bring the music to local shores (whereas in Germany it had a greater life in a live performance context).Footnote ³

Today, the availability of streaming services, digital outlets that connect independent bands directly with fans, and various reissues of earlier albums have together afforded renewed accessibility of Krautrock to contemporary audiences. Although incomplete, the works of many well-known Krautrock acts can now be found on digital services, including Amon Düül II, Faust, Neu!, Cluster, and so on. Rarer items are also available on streaming services, such as the only release from German Oak, Down in the Bunker (1972), which sold few physical copies during the 1970s but became highly sought-after as a collector’s item and was previously only available through bootlegs or unofficial releases.

Understanding Krautrock

As a broad anglophone construction, the term ‘Krautrock’ operates more in common with the commercially motivated umbrella term ‘world music’ than as a precise musical style category, and the validity of conceptualising Krautrock as a movement has been critiqued elsewhere.Footnote ⁴ Most frequently, Krautrock is understood in relation to a canon consisting of bands who were active during 1968–74 in West Germany and were ascribed the label Krautrock: Faust, Can, Neu!, Harmonia, and so on.Footnote ⁵

Although musically diverse, for David Buckley, ‘Krautrock bands were united by the common ideology of wanting to create a uniquely German pop culture after those decades post-World War II when Anglo-American culture was pre-eminent.’Footnote ⁶ This argument for a unifying Krautrock ideology is supported by commonalities in Krautrock bands’ approach towards guerrilla gigs, eschewing celebrity, and employing experimental musical vocabulary. Littlejohn also points to some general stylistic norms: extended form, extended instrumental techniques or the use of unconventional sound sources/processing, and (in many cases) instrumental tracks without extended lyrics.Footnote ⁷ Harden also explores how the available music technology informed the ‘sound’ of kosmische Musik (exemplified by Ohr Records’ Kosmische Musik compilation from 1972) in terms of the creative use of simulated phonographic space (through panning, delay, reverb, and so on), sound-sources that are often either abstracted from acoustical sources or with no acoustical equivalent, and particularities in terms of performance style.Footnote ⁸

Due to the sweeping changes in music production and reception since the 1970s, this chapter takes a purposefully broad approach, to include: bands who either associate themselves with Krautrock or are ascribed the label in listener discourse; those who share musical similarity with Krautrock’s originators; and acts endorsed or supported by acknowledged Krautrock figures.

Krautrock in Contemporary Germany

Following the mid-1970s, many Krautrock acts either disbanded or began to move away from the progressive/psychedelic sounds of their earlier work. Kraftwerk honed their practice with a greater emphasis on popular song structure, while several bands (including Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Harmonia) contributed to a growing body of electronic ambient music. Nevertheless, several original bands also reunited in the 1980s and 1990s to release music comparable to their Krautrock origins: the 1980s saw Can reunite to create Rite Time, and an offshoot of Amon Düül II form in Britain, led by original guitarist John Weinzierl; in the early 1990s, Frumpy recorded two further studio albums, while Faust also reunited for a series of live performances and studio albums.

Aside from reunions of bands that were already a part of a recognised canon, new generations of musicians emerged who were familiar with their predecessors’ musical vocabulary and shared, to varying extents, comparable social complications of post-war Germany. With the ramifications of the Cold War and the legacy of Nazism pervading the public consciousness, several bands emerged from Germany who shared the experimentalism and sonic character of Krautrock. Electric Orange and To Rococo Rot are two such examples, emerging from Aachen in 1992 and Berlin in 1994 respectively. The influence of kosmische musicians such as Klaus Schulze and early Tangerine Dream on German prog-rock band Electric Orange can be heard exemplified in ‘More End/Cyberdelic’ (Cyberdelic, 1996). Throughout, the nine-minute track is underpinned by dissonant synthesiser textures, decorative non-diatonic synthesiser effects, and sound effects that resemble reversed tape loops. Although there are two distinct sections in the track, much of the track’s textural variation is achieved through gradual fades. In terms of production, several similarities with Krautrock can also be heard, especially in terms of the wide stereo panning and use of effects (in this case, reverb and distortion, which were both common in the 1970s).

Berlin’s To Rococo Rot, meanwhile, suggest a greater similarity with Faust, Neu!, and Cluster, quickly becoming known for electronics-led post-punk with accompanying digital media performances. The 1996 release of their eponymous first album led to a career in which the band released eight main albums in total; most recently, Instrumentals (2014). As with many canonical Krautrock productions, To Rococo Rot’s music is characterised by its instrumental nature, use of electronics alongside bass and guitar, and lengthy repeated grooves. Supporting To Rococo Rot’s Krautrock credentials, ‘Friday’ from their 2010 album Speculation was conceived with Hans-Joachim Irmler, a founding member of Faust. Throughout, the track avoids clear metre, but does incorporate some repetitive, percussive gestures. A sense of tonal centre is offered by drone textures throughout the track, although there is no melody or repetitive harmonic gestures, in line with various earlier Krautrock tracks.

Also from Berlin, several years later, came Camera, a ‘neo-Krautrock’ three-piece according to Ben Graham’s review of their 2012 debut Radiate!.Footnote ⁹ In particular, he argues that Camera ‘have more claim than most to be upholders of the kraut tradition, whatever that may be’ based on their origin in Berlin, performance in public spaces, joint gigs with Michael Rother (of Neu!) and Dieter Moebius (of Harmonia), and use of improvisation.Footnote ¹⁰ The band’s biography on their record label’s website makes a further explicit connection with Krautrock, drawing comparison to Neu!, Can, and La Düsseldorf. It reads:

‘E-Go’, which opens Radiate!, offers a helpful example of the band’s idiolect: although there is minimal use of synthesisers and little of the sound effect noises used by various Krautrock bands, the track derives its momentum from a repetitive, motorik-like beat with occasional embellishments, over static harmony, with considerable distortion used on several electric guitar tracks. The track is instrumental and develops a sense of structure primarily using texture rather than tonal ideas. These qualities of texture-driven structure, static harmony, motorik-like drum patterns, and noisy texture provide a blueprint for much of the album.

Krautrock Worldwide

When Krautrock was first coined, Germany was not alone in accommodating this sort of musical experimentalism; France, for instance, was home to bands who similarly explored repetition, form, and texture, as heard in bands such as Magma, Besombes-Rizet, and Heldon. Yet, with Germany still occupying the public consciousness, connections remained: Magma derived many lyrics from German phonetics, while Heldon took their name from Norman Spinrad’s 1972 novel The Iron Dream, which revolves around Adolf Hitler in a fictional alternative history. A similar fascination with German culture is demonstrated by the periods in which Brian Eno, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop spent living in West Germany during the 1970s.

With the availability of music imports, Krautrock helped to shape developing musical scenes elsewhere. In Britain, the burgeoning post-punk scene (including bands such as Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division, and Simple Minds) drew heavily on the sounds of Krautrock, despite the creative impetus of several Krautrock bands to develop a form of music not associated with anglophone pop or rock. Indeed, throughout the 1980s, prolific Krautrock producer Conny Plank became a key collaborator for new wave acts such as Ultravox and Eurythmics. Accordingly, it is unsurprising that contemporary examples of Krautrock can be found across Continental Europe, Britain, and the United States. Critical discourse has even credited Krautrock as an influence for such high-profile albums as Radiohead’s Kid A (2000) and Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach (2010).Footnote ¹²

Continental Europe

In contemporary France, we can find several examples of bands that draw from Krautrock. In 2010, Biarritz was home to the formation of La Femme, whom The Quietus describe as being ‘to all intents and purposes a Krautrock band’.Footnote ¹³ In 2013, La Femme released their debut album entitled Psycho Tropical Berlin, which was subsequently awarded a Victoires de la Musique award by the French Ministry of Culture. The album consists primarily of roughly four-minute-long tracks combining bass, synthesiser, drums, guitar, and vocals. For the most part, their music consists of a small number of musical ideas that are repeated, often alternating a texted section with instrumental breaks in the same bass and/or harmonic setting (in contrast to the interpolation of a texted chorus). In combination with the use of short, repeated vocal ideas (rather than extended sung phrases), these qualities offer some similarity with the work of Can.

In a comparable manner to Munich-based Popul Vuh, Aluk Todolo formed in Paris in 2004, taking their name from a religious practice indigenous to a mountainous region of Indonesia. In sharp contrast to La Femme, Aluk Todolo’s work is characterised by long-form tracks of roughly ten minutes, which incorporate passages of clear metre, and passages in which the band use textural development as the point of focus. Sonically, the use of heavily distorted texture and ambivalence towards musical pitch draw some similarity with aspects of Faust’s work or early work by Cluster, while the application of drums (featuring mostly dense, repetitive grooves) reflects a character of the earlier work of Can and Neu! These devices can be heard particularly clearly throughout Occult Rock (2012) album.

The Finnish band Circle provide a contrasting combination of Krautrock and heavy metal. Marketing themselves as part of the ‘New Wave of Finnish Heavy Metal’, the band formed in 1991, described as a combination of ‘metal, Krautrock, psychedelia, ambient, jazz, prog, art rock, soft rock, and other assorted fusions’.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, despite drawing on a diverse range of musical influences, the band share similarities with Krautrock originators in the form of the sheer range of members’ side projects and in their cynical attitude towards the recording industry. Circle’s Incarnation (2013) album was in fact recorded by different musicians, while the members of Circle recorded Frontier (2013) under the name Falcon.

In contrast to Aluk Todolo’s use of slowly developing drones, Circle’s music incorporates vocals and a clear metric structure. Circle’s debut, Meronia (1994) includes several clear examples of Krautrock’s influence. ‘Wherever Particular People Congregate’, for example, captures a frenetic quality comparable to Faust’s up-tempo works through its use of dissonant textures and manipulation of garbled vocal phrases that take on the character of experimentations with tape manipulation by Neu! Nevertheless, as heard in ‘Meronia’, the band also apply lengthy repeated segments in which the main musical developments are led by changes in texture, a frequent characteristic of the Krautrock canon.

Unlike several of the bands discussed, the Croatian band Seven That Spells explicitly relate their work with Krautrock via a trilogy of albums released between 2011 and 2018 entitled The Death and Resurrection of Krautrock comprising AUM (2011), IO (2014), and Omega (2018). Making such an overt connection between their work and Krautrock is uncommon, although musical similarities can be observed. In each album, the band incorporate instrumentation comparable with a large volume of Krautrock music: drums, bass, guitar, synthesiser, and vocals. Although the band incorporate idiomatic modal elements of metal music not generally heard in Krautrock, the band’s use of polymetric rhythms and modal scale patterns do evoke some similarity with Agitation Free and Amon Düül II’s early studio releases.

Britain and the Americas

As Alexander Simmeth explores, record imports, radio, and national coverage in music media helped Krautrock to reach significant audiences in both Britain and the United States.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, at the time in which Krautrock emerged, allied troops still maintained a presence within West Germany, contributing to intercultural exchange. As early as the late 1970s, the United States was home to musical scenes that created their own spin on Krautrock. One such example is The Nightcrawlers, who formed in Pennsylvania around 1979 and published many cassette albums, now unavailable, in the style of Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and the broader Berlin scene earlier in the 1970s. Although mostly unavailable today, there has been some attempt from fans to document and preserve coverage of the band and their contemporaries.Footnote ¹⁶

The 1990s was a time of particular interest in Krautrock, fuelled by new bands and the publication of Cope’s Krautrocksampler. In 1990 in London, Stereolab formed from the leader of British indie pop band McCarthy, French vocalist Lætitia Sadier, bassist Martin Kean, and drummer Joe Dilworth. Simon Reynolds’ 1994 interview with the band explores a Krautrock influence on Stereolab’s music, particularly the work of Neu!Footnote ¹⁷ Such an influence can be heard on tracks such as ‘Orgiastic’ from the band’s first studio album, Peng! (1992), conveyed through the use of the motorik beat, limited use of lyrics, and prosaic delivery. Sonically, the recording is dominated by low frequencies, giving the track a subdued character (as opposed to the crisper sonic character that comes from a mix balanced with greater strength in higher frequency bands), evoking a ‘low-fi’ quality compatible with many early Krautrock releases.

Several years later, the duo Immersion formed in 1994, bringing together the lead singer/songwriter of post-punk band Wire and the bassist/vocalist of 1980s Israeli post-punk band Minimal Compact. To accompany the release of their album, Sleepless (2018), the pair’s website highlights the influence of Tangerine Dream and Popul Vuh.Footnote ¹⁸ ‘Propulsoid’ from Sleepless perhaps offers the best window into the pair’s Krautrock influences, an up-tempo but slowly developing track that is supported throughout by a motorik drum beat and a repeated one-bar synth bassline. Instrumentally, the track is comparable to a Krautrock ensemble: the bass synth tone is a simple buzzy timbre with gradual modulation of a low-pass filter throughout, and it is joined later by a simple distorted electric guitar texture and electric organ, which provides the only sense of harmonic movement in the track. Similarly, ‘Immersion’ from their debut album Oscillating (1994) is underpinned by a repeated bassline on a sampled alto saxophone, accompanied later by sustained synth pads, a monophonic lead synthesiser, and sequenced decorative elements. Here, the mobility and ambit of the monophonic lead synth, as well as the modulation of a low-pass filter, reflect common practice for Klaus Schulze.

While Stereolab and Immersion were beginning their careers in Britain, Tortoise were being formed in Chicago. The band incorporated significant Krautrock and dub influences, and soon became an important contributor to the American post-rock movement of the era. ‘Djed’ from the band’s 1996 album Millions Now Living Will Never Die provides one such exposition of their Krautrock-influenced work. The track lasts for more than twenty minutes with several abrupt shifts of musical texture. Here, the opening best illustrates the band’s Krautrock influences; a distorted percussive loop provides a polymetric feel against a dissonant modal interplay of electric guitar and bass, accompanied by decorative electronic gestures and a delay sound effect. After two-and-a-half minutes, a motorik drum pattern enters with a slight flange to the high-hat, while the bass and electric guitar grooves change to patterns that repeat for several minutes and together evoke the character of the mid-1970s work of Neu!

Several years later in Orlando, Tonstartssbandht formed and have gone on to release a large number of studio albums, developing a musical style described by Pitchfork Magazine as ‘the sound of Guided by Voices swapping out their arena rock fantasies of being in The Who for being a member of Amon Düül’s Munich commune instead’.Footnote ¹⁹ The pair’s work incorporates a range of influences to create a psychedelic rock oeuvre that draws in equal measure from Krautrock musical textures and its sense of critiquing or challenging anglophone pop’s use of lyrics. ‘Midnite Cobras’ from Tonstartssbandht’s debut album An When (2009) demonstrates a more extreme affinity, perhaps, with distorted textures than would be found in Krautrock, but nevertheless shares several telling traits. Thinking of production, the track constructs a large sense of space using panning, delay, and reverb. And, while the track includes extended lyrics, they are delivered with imprecise timing and pitch, evoking the use of unskilled or unpolished textures common in Krautrock.

Towards the end of the 2000s, three further bands of note emerged: Wume (United States), Beak (Britain), and Föllakzoid (Chile). Wume are perhaps the United States’s best-known contemporary Krautrock export and even derive their name from the river Wümme in northern Germany (where Faust’s commune/studio was located). From a production perspective, the access to, and availability of improved recording technology affords Wume a far cleaner sound than original Krautrock bands. From a musical perspective, however, we can observe several similarities: their music is realised using a combination of drum kit and synthesiser, often incorporating repetitive beats or sequences in complex time signatures or in order to construct polyrhythms.

‘Control’, which opens Wume’s Maintain (2015) album provides a clear example, lasting approximately four-and-a-half minutes via a gradual development of texture but no repeating sections. It begins with a repeating sequence with gentle delay and the use of a low-pass filter (both common for Krautrock originals). When the drums enter, they too repeat a single idea with minimal variation. Synthesiser textures are also used for bass and harmonic elements, in each case using simple timbres of the sort that were available during the Krautrock era. Two-thirds through the track, a syncopated vocal idea is added, although the lyrics are used primarily as punctuation; the words themselves are unintelligible in the mix.

In the same year as Wume formed, in Bristol, Geoff Barrow (known primarily for his role in Portishead) created Beak. Heather Phares describes Beak’s work as ‘inspired by dub, Krautrock, and the Beach Boys’, going on to describe how the band’s debut album was recorded over twelve days without any overdubbing.Footnote ²⁰ ‘Failand’, released in 2014, makes several audible allusions to earlier Krautrock, particularly via a sparse selection of musical ideas across a long form, making use of distortion, reverb, and delay, which were the most widely available (and widely used) effects across the breadth of the Krautrock canon. The track broadly falls into two main sections: from an unintelligible vocal opening, the first section is primarily noise-based with considerable distorted electric guitar; the second, however, makes use of a less distorted, muted guitar-like lead, which repeats a single idea with occasional variations for around four minutes, alongside a motorik-like drum beat.

Finally, from Chile hail Föllakzoid, a trio with a large online following who are often connected in critical discourse with Krautrock, although the band themselves instead characterise their music as ‘heavily informed by the heritage of the ancient music of the Andes’.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, when interviewed, the band’s vocalist appears lukewarm about the association with Krautrock:

The compatibility that Föllakzoid describe between their music and the ‘ritualistic vibe’ of canonical Krautrock bands is apparent in a similar use of texture and supported by production aesthetic. Föllakzoid’s instrumentation immediately lends a sense of familiarity, combining bass, synthesiser, drums, distorted electric guitars, and sparse vocal phrases. In addition to this textural similarity with Krautrock, the band incorporate extensive improvisation into their work to create free-form musical structures that share similarities with Ash Ra Tempel or, to some extent, Neu!.

Issues in Contemporary Krautrock

Over the past five decades, the intermingling of Krautrock with other styles of music making have diversified an already eclectic body of music, establishing a global community of musicians who illustrate greater diversity in terms of gender, age, and geographical origin. Via this globalisation, the sound of Krautrock continues to be heard in new forms today. And, although this outlasts the association of Krautrock’s sound with the development of a distinct German cultural identity (exemplified strongest by Föllakzoid), it reinforces the cultural role that the Krautrock canon has played for modern music. Indeed, the readiness with which critical commentary and bands themselves refer to Krautrock demonstrates the body of work’s lasting cultural appeal.

A keyway in which the contemporary bands explored in this chapter diverge from canonical Krautrock musicians lies in the use of the Internet as a tool for distribution and discovery. This democratises Krautrock in the sense that it affords the opportunity for musicians outside of its original context to participate in a shared body of musical practice. However, while the internet also offers ways of reaching fans that were not available in the last century, many of the bands discussed make limited use of social media; few even offer any substantive biographical details about themselves on social media channels or official websites (if applicable). In doing so, they reflect a common approach of earlier Krautrock musicians who similarly avoided celebrity, as David Stubbs describes in his commentary of Can’s Future Days.Footnote ²³

In tandem, Krautrock’s cultural place has diversified. For early Krautrockers, their music was intended to run counter to the dominant forms of music making available in Germany and attracted a significant audience but gained its largest following overseas. Adelt argues that Krautrock’s otherness (in terms of both being a foreign import and the unusual sonic palette of Krautrock when compared to Anglo-American music making of the time) helped the music to accrue significant subcultural capital.Footnote ²⁴ While this continues in the form of journalistic discourse that reifies Krautrock, we can also observe greater malleability of Krautrock’s cultural capital via its role in high-art contexts. To Rococo Rot, for instance, illustrate the successful integration of Krautrock and digital media installations. And, in Britain, exhibitions celebrating the contributions of Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk both demonstrate a contemporary appreciation of Krautrock within gallery or museum contexts.Footnote ²⁵

The continued practice of Krautrock-influenced music making today provides an opportunity to consider its role in relation to the original Krautrock canon. For both Camera and To Rococo Rot, their interaction with earlier musicians become focal aspects of the bands’ narratives. Similarly, both Wume and Seven That Spells acknowledge the genre through their naming choices. In doing so, these later bands contribute to the historicisation of Krautrock, reinforcing a canon of earlier German musicians who – in the main – did not endorse such categorisation. As Föllakzoid illustrate, this can also distract from artistic foci. In their case, they choose to distance themselves from previous Krautrock bands and instead reassert the importance of their work’s spiritual origins.

Despite being geographically and historically separate, the bands surveyed in this chapter share in Krautrock’s ideological aspects, employ similar creative practices, or hold connections to the genre’s surviving originators, allowing them to establish credentials as Krautrockers. For some, the influence of Krautrock is explicit via reference to the style label itself or overt musical similarity. For others, the influence of Krautrock has been less direct, influenced by bands operating in other styles that derived in some part from Krautrock. The long-lasting significance of Krautrock offers several opportunities for further study. One particular opportunity lies in exploring the role of Krautrock as an act of cultural memorialisation; for Andrew Hurley, for instance, the noise and cultural memory of wartime life were key creative impetuses for the 1980s German band Einstürzende Neu-bauten.Footnote ²⁶ Such an approach may reward investigation in relation to bands covered above across Europe. On a related note, while Krautrock has received growing recognition from the academic community, similar experimental music scenes, such as in 1970s France, have not yet received comprehensive study.

We have focused on popular music makers in the Western world, primarily as Krautrock itself is a Germanic form of music making by those to whom most available popular music was either German or Anglo-American, however that is not to say that Krautrock has not also inspired music elsewhere. Adelt, for instance, briefly draws a connection between Krautrock and Yellow Magic Orchestra, indicating an opportunity to consider Krautrock’s cultural role in Eastern countries.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, bands such as Boredoms, who originated during the mid-1980s in Osaka, Japan have developed an idiolect comparable to Krautrock in terms of texture, repetition, and form.

The musical and geographical breadth of musicians surveyed in this chapter illustrates the diffusion of Krautrock’s originators’ sonic vocabulary in different musical practices today. In doing so, it opens a plurality of understandings of Krautrock. At its most restrictive, we might conceive of Krautrock as a stylistically diverse range of originators who have since become a part of an acknowledged canon to commentators and fans (those operating in West Germany around 1968–74). At one remove from these canonical acts, we could consider contemporaneous non-German musicians (including David Bowie or Brian Eno) who created work that drew considerably from their Krautrock contemporaries. At a further remove, we can consider musical practice that came after the Krautrock era but shared stylistic aspects with Krautrock (including several grunge and new wave artists such as Soundgarden, Joy Division, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Love Battery, and Simple Minds). And, finally, in the most inclusive sense, we could view Krautrock as an ongoing, now-global practice, including acts who occupy a vastly different cultural and commercial landscape, but nevertheless share some aesthetic commonality with canonical Krautrock musicians.

Essential Listening

• Beak, ⋙ (Invada Records, 2018)

• Camera, Radiate! (Bureau B, 2012)

• Föllakzoid, III (Sacred Bones, 2015)

• To Rococo Rot, To Rococo Rot (Kitty-Yo, 1996)

• Tonstartssbandht, An When (Dœs Are, 2009)